CLAM allows you to quickly and transparently transform your Natural LanguageProcessing application into a RESTful webservice, with which both humanend-users as well as automated clients can interact. CLAM takes a descriptionof your system and wraps itself around the system, allowing end-users orautomated clients to upload input files to your application, start yourapplication with specific parameters of their choice, and download and view theoutput of the application once it is completed.

CLAM is set up in a universal fashion, requiring minimal effort on the part ofthe service developer. Your actual NLP application is treated as a black box,of which only the parameters, input formats and output formats need to bedescribed. Your application itself needs not be network aware in any way, noraware of CLAM, and the handling and validation of input can be taken care of byCLAM.

CLAM is entirely written in Python, runs on UNIX-derived systems, and isavailable as open source under the GNU Public License (v3). It is set up in amodular fashion, and offers an API, and as such is easily extendable. CLAMcommunicates in a transparent XML format, and using XSL transformation offers afull web 2.0 web-interface for human end users.

For installation instructions, make sure to read the provided 'INSTALL' file!For full documentation see the manual in docs/clam_manual.pdf , also accessiblethrough the CLAM website at http://proycon.github.io/clam . It is recommendedto read this prior to starting with CLAM.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: It's discouraged to download the zip packages or tarballsfrom github, either properly use git instead, or install CLAM from the PythonPackage Index (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/CLAM), through easy_install, whichit the recommended way:

$ sudo easy_install clam

This will download CLAM automatically. If you obtained the git version and whatto install that:

$ sudo ./setup.py install

For further installation instructions, please read the supplied INSTALL file.